Monarchs navigate to their overwintering sites with striking precision each year. How and why “eastern” monarchs choose specific peaks within the oyamel fir forests of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt are still largely unknown. These choices likely involve navigation mechanisms that are unique among insects. We are combining novel miniaturized tracking electronics and machine learning methods with next-generation sequencing and imaging approaches to understand individual-level behaviors during migration.
This work is an ongoing collaboration with David Blaauw (UM EECS), Hun-Seok Kim (UM EECS) and Inhee Lee (U Pittsburgh ECE). This work is supported by the Monarch Butterfly Fund Flight Challenge, National Geographic Society, and the National Science Foundation.
Join our tracking project!
Over 100 volunteers from across the US and Canada are active collaborators on this project, helping us collect data to refine our tracking methods. Learn how to become a part of the team!
Image credit: Katherine Ernst
Recent Publications
- Hamed EA, Carichner G, Green II DA, Kim H-S, and Lee I. Hybrid Time-stamping with Shock-Resistant Precision in Miniature Butte in IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, vol. 33, no. 7, pp. 2004-2008, July 2025, doi: 10.1109/TVLSI.2025.3544410.
- Green II DA. Tracking technologies: advances driving new findings on monarch migration (2023). Curr Opin Insect Sci. 60:101111. doi: 10.1016/j.cois.2023.101111.
- Shoouri S, Yang M, Carichner G, Li Y, Hamed EA, Deng A, Green II DA, Lee I, Blaauw D, and Kim H-S. Siamese learning-based monarch butterfly localization (2022). In 2022 IEEE Data Science and Learning Workshop. pp. 1-7. doi: 10.1109/dslw53931.2022.9820497
- Lee I∗, Hsiao R, Carichner G, Hsu C-W, Yang M, Shoouri S, Ernst K, Carichner T, Li Y, Lim J, Julick CR, Moon E, Sun Y, Phillips J, Montooth KL, Green II DA, Kim H-S, and Blaauw D (2021) mSAIL: Milligram-Scale Multi-Modal Sensor & Analytics Monitoring Platform for Monarch Butterfly Migration Tracking. (Accepted for the 2021 ACM Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking)
- Yang M, Hsiao R, Carichner G, Ernst K, Lim J, Green II, DA, Lee I, Blaauw D, AND Kim H-S. Migrating Monarch Butterfly Localization Using Multi-Sensor Fusion Neural Networks. Submitted 14 Dec 2019. arXiv:1912.06907.
